How is your personal productivity? Are you satisfied with what you are accomplishing? Do you wish you could do more? Is doing more possible? Those are some of the questions a coach would ask. We use the phrase best life coach in the title to accentuate the concept of living one’s best life.

When people are happy with how productive they are on a daily basis, they have a sense of satisfaction at the end of every day. They may suffer setbacks. But they realize that setbacks are inevitable.

If they are constantly ending the day with a feeling of disappointment, something is wrong. They might have set goals that are too high, impossible to achieve on a daily basis. Often though, the problem is that they failed to set any short-term goals at all.

Setting realistic goals is important, but not as important as defining personal productivity goals in the first place. If you have yet to define your goals, take some time to sit down and put them on paper.

In a quiet, unstressed setting, think about where you want to be in 10 years. Then move backwards in time. Think of it as if you were planning a car trip. What are the paths you will take to reach your ten-year goal?

A business coach would tell a company owner to do the same thing. 10 years is not the longest period of time that can be chosen. It is just an arbitrary number.

An individual might want to think in terms of retirement. “I want to be able to retire in 20 years with ample income from my investments to support me for the rest of my life.” That’s an example of an individual long-term goal.

Companies have different goals. There are profits to be made. Sales goals need to be defined. Plans for expanding may be a consideration.

There are many different things to consider. A business coach might talk to owners about their own personal productivity. The owners may want their employees to be more productive. While we often talk about looking at the big picture, it is important to look at the smaller parts. Those smaller parts combine to make up the big picture.

A business coach is helpful because of the unbiased viewpoint. A person inside of an organization has preconceived notions. He or she might think that it is the person down the hall who needs to be more productive.

An unbiased person can look at the scene and see something completely different. Think your personal productivity is good? Ask someone else to take a look.

Sarah was envious of her colleague who manages to get off work on time every day. She seems to be able to accomplish all her projects on time. In addition to that, she has the time to offer help to the rest of her members on her team. Sarah, on the other hand has to take her work home in order to complete her project on time.

Her colleague, Betty always has a list to check off from before she leaves for the day. In addition, she has a separate list whereby she lists her task for the next day. She wondered if that small piece of paper laid the secret to her personal productivity. Sarah decided to find out from her colleague, Betty.

According to Betty, the small list which she wrote out the day before allows her to plan her day the next day. This is indeed one of her secrets to personal productivity and helps her to plan out her work the day before. She knows exactly what she needs to get done and accomplish for the day.

Besides that, these are the three additional personal productivity tips she has to share with her.

#1 Do a time audit

Time is a finite resource. In order to increase your personal productivity, you have to know how you are spending your time. A single table listing every activity you do and the time taken for each will reveal how you are spending your time. For instance, Betty discovered during the time audit that she was previously spending a lot of time surfing the Internet the minute she logged onto her email account at the beginning of the day. Thus, she decided to read work related email once she has completed her most vital task for the day instead of at the beginning of her work day.

#2 Set Goals

In order to make best use of your time, you have to set goals. The best way to manage your daily activities is to take your annual goals and break them into monthly, weekly and daily action steps to take.

You can better manage your time on a daily basis if you first begin the day by listing the tasks that need to be accomplished. By having a list of goals, you can also evaluate your progress on a daily basis.

#3 Monitor your progress

What gets measured improves. Once you have listed your tasks for the day, you have to evaluate your progress.

For a start, evaluate your progress on an hourly basis to ensure you have accomplished what you have set out to do in that hour. Once you are familiar with this process, you can evaluate your progress on a daily basis and subsequently on a weekly basis.

To continue to find new ways to increase your productivity at work, always take an hour a month to evaluate your activities and list down the things that can be delegated to free up your time. This one hour investment of your time also allows you to improve the process at work. You can further improve your personal productivity by using personal productivity tools.

For anyone with a lot of drive and ambition finding ways to improve upon their personal productivity would be of great value to them. In an age where we seem to be required to get more done and in less time the need to increase productivity is even greater. Our lives continue to roll out challenges that can only be met by stepping up our own personal performance. To continue to meet these challenges in a successful fashion therefore will require assistance that can only come from within. These improvements we seek would have to start with certain behavioral modifications.

Let’s look at 5 ways for increasing productivity in our busy lives by tapping into our own inner resources.

Maintain a Positive Attitude

In the pursuit of any chosen objectives always hang onto the mindset that you can and will complete or accomplish your goals successfully. This will help you maintain your drive and an upbeat attitude.

Don’t Procrastinate

Thinking about it is not doing it. Take the necessary actions you need to actually get the job done. The more you ponder an undertaking the more challenging in may become in your mind. This can easily lead to self doubt on your part making your efforts seem all the more difficult or even futile. Just do it!

View Yourself through the Eyes of Others

Your critics are often your best source of self-growth. It is good to have a healthy self esteem however this perception can sometimes hinder our progress in certain endeavors. The need to look outside ourselves and view how the world perceives us is a reality check that everyone needs to take from time to time.

Simply Walk the Walk

Let others brag about their ideas and accomplishments while you quietly go about establishing and achieving your goals. You’ll be more productive and admired this way.

Be Proactive

Don’t always follow the crowd if your instincts are telling you there is a better way to accomplish something. Taking the initiative and possessing the self confidence to ‘blaze a new trail’ is a great way to experience personal growth. In addition it is the only way to determine if your idea will work or not.

As you can see the means do exist for us to increase our personal productivity by calling upon certain inner strengths and disciplines. By slightly rearranging your thinking and attitude you can make significant gains in your own personal performance. Your ability to increase productivity will come from your willingness to exercise these inner strengths and adopt them as your new norm. By modifying your behavior and attitude following the suggestions we discussed above increasing productivity should not be very difficult for you. The inner peace that you will likely experience as a result should help keep you calm and rested to meet the challenges of the fast paced world in which we live.

If you’re a canny shopper then read on, because you might find some of the following information extremely useful.

That’s because canny shoppers are slowly beginning to realise that you have to be very careful when you choose your personal products in the supermarket or elsewhere. Unfortunately many of the personal products that so many of us consume every single day can be dangerous.

Yes, unfortunately it’s true. These products, including soaps, shampoos, deodorants, skin care products, cosmetics and much more can contain chemical ingredients which are, in many cases, known to be dangerous to our health and even to cause cancer.

Whilst this is not new there is a gradual ground swell of organisations and people who are attempting to publicise the fact that many brands of product should be avoided.

Unfortunately the problem stems from the fact that regulation in many countries is inadequate to force the companies that manufacture many of these products to use only known safe ingredients.

In many cases there is little or no official supervision of any of the ingredients which are used in personal products, and for this reason many of the ingredients used in our personal products are industrial chemicals which are known to cause health problems for people.

Whole organisations are dedicated to publicising this issue. Two such organisations are the Campaign for Safe Cosmetics, which seeks to alert people to the risks involved in using many brands of cosmetics and other personal products, and the Cosmetic Safety Database which gives people a place to go to search both ingredients found in many products as well as the products themselves to find out the perceived level of risk in using the product or the ingredient.

I’ll give you one quick example. Many products include some form of fragrance. After all it doesn’t like to smell good? However unfortunately many fragrances are simply a combination of chemicals, many of which are known to be risky to your health.

These chemicals are rarely if ever listed, all you will ever see on the label is some generic terms such as “fragrance”. No one knows what chemicals make up the fragrance.

So if you’re a canny shopper it will pay you to do some research online to find out more about how to find safe cosmetics, safe skin care products and other safe products when you’re buying for yourself and your family. There are high quality and safe products available, but they’re not the big brand names.

Spend some time online, research and learn as much as you can, starting with the organisations that are listed above, and you can be an educated and canny consumer who knows what to buy and what to avoid when you’re looking to stock your bathroom cabinet.